4.50 From Paddington (11 page)

Miss Marple, sitting erect against a background of china dogs and presents from Margate, smiled approvingly at Inspector Dermot Craddock.

“I'm so glad,” she said, “that you have been assigned to the case. I hoped you would be.”

“When I got your letter,” said Craddock, “I took it straight to the A.C. As it happened he had just heard from the Brackhampton people calling us in. They seemed to think it wasn't a local crime. The A.C. was very interested in what I had to tell him about you. He'd heard about you, I gather, from my godfather.”

“Dear Sir Henry,” murmured Miss Marple affectionately.

“He got me to tell him all about the Little Paddocks business. Do you want to hear what he said next?”

“Please tell me if it is not a breach of confidence.”

“He said, 'Well, as this seems a completely cockeyed business, all thought up by a couple of old ladies who've turned out, against all probability, to the right, and since you already know one of these old ladies, I'm sending you down on the case.' So here I am! And now, my dear Miss Marple, where do we go from here? This is not, as you probably appreciate, an official visit. I haven't got my henchmen with me. I thought you and I might take down our back hair together first.”

Miss Marple smiled at him.

“I'm sure,” she said, “that no one who only knows you officially would ever guess that you could be so human, and better-looking than ever - don't blush... Now, what, exactly, have you been told so far?”

“I've got everything, I think. Your friend, Mrs. McGillicuddy's original statement to the police at St. Mary Mead, confirmation of her statement by the ticket collector, and also the note to the station master at Brackhampton. I may say that all the proper inquiries were made by the people concerned - the railway people and the police. But there's no doubt that you outsmarted them all by a most fantastic process of guesswork.”

“Not guesswork,” said Miss Marple.

“And I had a great advantage. I knew Elspeth McGillicuddy. Nobody else did. There was no obvious confirmation of her story, and if there was no question of any woman being reported missing, then quite naturally they would think it was just an elderly lady imagining things - as elderly ladies often do - but not Elspeth McGillicuddy.”

“Not Elspeth McGillicuddy,” agreed the Inspector. “I'm looking forward to meeting her, you know. I wish she hadn't gone to Ceylon. We're arranging for her to be interviewed there, by the way.”

“My own process of reasoning was not really original,” said Miss Marple. “It's all in Mark Twain. The boy who found the horse. He just imagined where he would go if he were a horse and he went there and there was the horse.”

“You imagined what you'd do if you were a cruel and cold-blooded murderer?” said Craddock looking thoughtfully at Miss Marple's pink and white elderly fragility.

“Really, your mind -”

“Like a sink, my nephew Raymond used to say,” Miss Marple agreed, nodding her head briskly. “But as I always told him, sinks are necessary domestic equipment and actually very hygienic.”

“Can you go a little further still, put yourself in the murderer's place, and tell me just where he is now?”

Miss Marple sighed.

“I wish I could. I've no idea - no idea at all. But he must be someone who has lived in, or knows all about, Rutherford Hall.”

“I agree. But that opens up a very wide field. Quite a succession of daily women have worked there. There's the Women's Institute - and the A.R.P. Wardens before them. They all know the Long Barn and the sarcophagus and where the key was kept. The whole set up there is widely known locally. Anybody living round about might hit on it as a good spot for his purpose.”

“Yes, indeed. I quite understand your difficulties.”

Craddock said: “We'll never get anywhere until we identify the body.”

“And that, too, may be difficult?”

“Oh, we'll get there - in the end. We're checking up on all the reported disappearances of a woman of that age and appearance. There's no one outstanding who fits the bill. The M.O. puts her down as about thirty-five, healthy, probably a married woman, has had at least one child. Her fur coat is a cheap one purchased at a London store. Hundreds of such coats were sold in the last three months, about sixty per cent of them to blonde women. No sales girl can recognise the photograph of the dead woman, or is likely to if the purchase were made just before Christmas. Her other clothes seem mainly of foreign manufacture, mostly purchased in Paris. There are no English laundry marks. We've communicated with Paris and they are checking up there for us. Sooner or later, of course, someone will come forward with a missing relative or lodger. It's just a matter of time.”

“The compact wasn't any help?”

“Unfortunately, no. It's a type sold by the hundred in the Rue de Rivoli, quite cheap. By the way, you ought to have turned that over to the police at once, you know - or rather Miss Eyelesbarrow should have done so.”

Miss Marple shook her head.

“But at that moment there wasn't any question of a crime having been committed,” she pointed out. “If a young lady, practising golf shots, picks up an old compact of no particular value in the long grass, surely she doesn't rush straight off to the police with it?”

Miss Marple paused, and then added firmly: “I thought it much wiser to find the body first.”

Inspector Craddock was tickled.

“You don't seem ever to have had any doubts but that it would be found?”

“I was sure it would. Lucy Eyelesbarrow is a most efficient and intelligent person.”

“I'll say she is! She scares the life out of me, she's so devastatingly efficient. No man will ever dare marry that girl.”

“Now you know, I wouldn't say that... It would have to be a special type of man, of course.” Miss Marple brooded on this thought a moment. “How is she getting on at Rutherford Hall?”

“They're completely dependent upon her as far as I can see. Eating out of her hand - literally as you might say. By the way, they know nothing about her connection with you. We've kept that dark.”

“She has no connection now with me. She has done what I asked her to do.”

“So she could hand in her notice and go if she wanted to?”

“Yes.”

“But she stops on. Why?”

“She has not mentioned her reasons to me. She is a very intelligent girl. I suspect that she has become interested.”

“In the problem? Or in the family?”

“It may be,” said Miss Marple, “that it is rather difficult to separate the two.”

Craddock looked hard at her.

“Have you got anything particular in mind?”

“Oh, no - oh, dear me, no.”

“I think you have.”

Miss Marple shook her head.

Dermot Craddock sighed. “So all I can do is to 'prosecute my inquiries' - to put it in jargon. A policeman's life is a dull one!”

“You'll get results, I'm sure.”

“Any ideas for me? More inspired guesswork?”

“I was thinking of things like theatrical companies,” said Miss Marple rather vaguely. “Touring from place to place and perhaps not many home ties. One of those young women would be much less likely to be missed.”

“Yes. Perhaps you've got something there. We'll pay special attention to that angle.” He added, “What are you smiling about?”

“I was just thinking,” said Miss Marple, “of Elspeth McGillicuddy's face when she hears we've found the body!”

“I simply can't make you out,” said Cedric Crackenthorpe.

He eased himself down on the decaying wall of a long derelict pigsty and stared at Lucy Eyelesbarrow.

“What can't you make out?”

“What you're doing here.”

“I'm earning my living.”

“As a skivvy?” He spoke disparagingly.

“You're out of date,” said Lucy. “Skivvy, indeed! I'm a Household Help, a Professional Domestician, or an Answer to Prayer, mainly the latter.”

“You can't like all the things you have to do - cooking and making beds and whirring about with a hoopla or whatever you call it, and sinking your arms up to the elbows in greasy water.”

Lucy laughed.

“Not the details, perhaps, but cooking satisfies my creative instincts, and there's something in me that really revels in clearing up mess.”

“I live in a permanent mess,” said Cedric. “I like it,” he added defiantly.

“You look as though you did.”

“My cottage in Ibiza is run on simple straightforward lines. Three plates, two cups and saucers, a bed, a table and a couple of chairs. There's dust everywhere and smears of paint and chips of stone - I sculpt as well as paint - and nobody's allowed to touch a thing. I won't have a woman near the place.”

“Not in any capacity?”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“I was assuming that a man of such artistic tastes presumably had some kind of love life.”

“My love life, as you call it, is my own business,” said Cedric with dignity. “What I won't have is woman in her tidying-up interfering bossing capacity!”

“How I'd love to have a go at your cottage,” said Lucy. “It would be a challenge!”

“You won't get the opportunity.”

“I suppose not.”

Some bricks fell out of the pigsty.

Cedric turned his head and looked into its nettle-ridden depths.

“Dear old Madge,” he said. “I remember her well. A sow of most endearing disposition and a prolific mother. Seventeen in the last litter, I remember. We used to come here on fine afternoons and scratch Madge's back with a stick. She loved it.”

“Why has this whole place been allowed to get into the state it's in? It can't only be the war?”

“You'd like to tidy this up, too, I suppose? What an interfering female you are. I quite see now why you would be the person to discover a body! You couldn't even leave a Greco-Roman sarcophagus alone.” He paused and then went on.

“No, it's not only the war. It's my father. What do you think of him, by the way?”

“I haven't had much time for thinking.”

“Don't evade the issue. He's as mean as hell, and in my opinion a bit crazy as well. Of course he hates all of us - except perhaps Emma. That's because of my grandfather's will.”

Lucy looked inquiring.

“My grandfather was the man who made the money. With the Crunchies and the Cracker Jacks and the Cosy Crisps. All the afternoon tea delicacies, and then, being far sighted, he switched on very early to Cheesies and Canapes so that now we cash in on cocktail parties in a big way. Well, the time came when father intimated that he had a soul above Crunchies. He travelled in Italy and the Balkans and Greece and dabbled in art. My grandfather was peeved. He decided my father was no man of business and a rather poor judge of art (quite right in both cases), so left all his money in trust for his grandchildren. Father had the income for life, but he couldn't touch the capital. Do you know what he did? He stopped spending money. He came here and began to save. I'd say that by now he's accumulated nearly as big a fortune as my grandfather left. And in the meantime all of us, Harold, myself, Alfred and Emma haven't got a penny of grandfather's money. I'm a stony-broke painter. Harold went into business and is now a prominent man in the City - he's the one with the moneymaking touch, though I've heard rumours that he's in Queer Street lately. Alfred - well, Alfred is usually known in the privacy of the family as Flash Alf -”